The present invention relates to computing systems, and deals more particularly with handling unexpected responses received in a client application such as a web browser, where the responses require the client-side application to issue an unexpected prompt and are triggered by requests from script executing in the client-side application.
In early scenarios involving web browsers and web servers, the content sent from the web server to the web browser comprised an entire web page. See FIG. 1, where components and flows of this approach are illustrated. As shown therein, a web browser 100 displays a web page (not shown in FIG. 1), and this web page sends 111 a request 110 for refreshed content. The request is received at a web application server 150, which processes 160 the request and sends 161 a revised web page back to the browser 100. Upon receiving the revised web page, the browser 100 refreshes the displayed page by loading 120 the response received from the server 150. While this approach was functional, it was determined to be undesirable when only a portion of the web page content was changed. As one problem with this existing approach, it was sometimes inconvenient or unpleasant for a user to view the frequent reloading (i.e., redisplaying) of the entire web page, because the reloading could cause what is referred to as a “screen flicker” phenomenon, where the page content appears to be flashing as it disappears for a moment and then reappears (i.e., due to the redisplay). As another problem, repeatedly sending the entire web page from the web server to the web browser often led to excessive bandwidth use for network transmissions.